Selling the great outdoors: expanding to a new facility, a pool and spa dealer broadens its business to "outerior" living

Pool & Spa News, Feb 13, 2004 by Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Over the past two years, the owners of Pools Plus have been focusing a lot on the plus.

Although pool and spa equipment continues to be the bread and butter of Fred and Linda Butler's business, this couple is intent on spreading the entire outdoor recreational smorgasbord.

"We're calling it 'outerior' design--it's not original, but it's my new word," Linda Butler says. "Like interior designers who design the inside of your house, we want to be designers of the outside."

Just stepping inside the Elizabethtown, Ky., store is like walking onto a backyard party that's always in progress--complete with a gated, filled pool. The showroom is surrounded by spas, barbecue grills, water falls and patio furniture beneath pergolas crawling with vines.

"It's important that customers be able to visualize what the products will look like in their own homes," Linda Butler says, "that's why we keep accessories with the spas and surround the furniture with a lot of greenery, just to give them inspiration as to what they can do in their backyard."

This outerior design concept that the Butlers have created within their showroom was inspired by their own need to rejuvenate their company.

"We had reached a place where we had kind of plateaued, and we needed something to renew our interest," Fred Butler says.

Around the same time, the couple began looking at expanding their business to include other backyard items, in order to retain the customers who were getting those things from the bigger chain stores.

But more products meant more space than their 2,000-square-foot showroom could handle. So they purchased a two-acre lot for $75,000 in the booming business district on Ring Road.

"We wanted to put up a 20,000-square-foot building and have the required number of parking spots and all those things," Fred Butler says.

"This is a heavily traveled area, so it allows us good visibility and access ... because we have a pretty good size service business as well," he says, "so there were a lot of factors that went into that decision."

Movin' on up

The site is now home to the Butler's Waterside Place Center, which includes 8,250 square feet of retail space and is more than four nines what they had in their old facility. Plus, they have an additional 6,750-square-feet area which they lease to other businesses.

"The reason we did that," Fred Butler explains, "is because as our business grew, we could take over our own lease space without having to move and build again."

Taking a few pages nut of Pool & Spa News, attending seminars and visiting other stores, the couple came up with their ideal design plan for the new store.

It took nine months and an estimated $12,000 in materials to construct the metal building. They painted the exterior with a cheery yellow paint called, coincidentally, Pot of Gold, to greet customers with a fun-in-the-California-sun feeling from the moment they drive up to the store.

"We have a lot of buildings built in classic, aid-Kentucky style," Fred Butler says. "Our old store was like that, with the red brick and a roof. It was typical. I wanted something that would stand out, something that was going to sell our concept."

And what good would it he to have a backyard feeling without seeing the back of the house? So, inside the showroom, they constructed a two-story, red-brick facade with a balcony, it's the focal point of the sales floor. The showroom's other walls are decked out in shades of peach and yellow that complement the terra cotta concrete flooring.

"I wanted a durable surface that we weren't going to have to spend a Lot of time taking care of," Fred Butler says. We run a forklift in our store, so it had to be a [floor] that could tolerate all kinds of traffic.

"Doing this concrete floor gives us a very durable, low-maintenance floor, and it also save us the earth-tone look that carried the whole design of the outdoor concept throughout the store."

The back of the store serves as the grilling area where barbecue pits are arranged on a wooden deck. The store is well lit with track lights and spotlighting. The white, 28-foot-high ceiling adds increased volume to the area.

The "Wow" effect

So it's not surprising, then, when the new Pools Plus opened in January 2002, it was high on "Wow!" appeal. Some customers would even come back with friends so they could see the place.

"They'd just stop and start looking at the overall store," Fred Butler boasts. "It's just really an eye catcher."

For the Butlers, there's been another eye opener, as they've seen their mailing list almost double from 5,000 to 8,000 consumers since the grand opening.

"We started adding new people to our customer base," he continues. "Some of those people were customers who did not have a pool or a spa, they just came in to buy furniture or gift products. We started adding new customers with pools and spas as well."

Business the first year was up 35 percent, "which was a good 10 percent above our business plan projections," says Fred Butler, who admits that the company's growth this year will only be about 3- or 4 percent due to downsizes in the economy and poor weather conditions.